1. Field
The present invention relates to electronic communication, and more specifically systems and methods of communicating via e-mail.
2. Background
In recent years e-mail has become a widely accepted a form of communication in most households and nearly all businesses. The vast majority of people who own computers use e-mail to communicate on a regular basis, with billions of e-mail messages being sent each day. Quite often a person receives an e-mail, and after reading it, wants to forward it to another person or a group of people. Forwarding an e-mail with a conventional e-mail application requires that the user clicks the “Forward” button (or other such control) and manually enter an e-mail address of the recipient(s) in the “To:” field. This is not a terribly difficult process, especially if the e-mail addresses of the recipients are in the address book of the user's e-mail application. However, each time this is done it takes the user a short period of time, say, anywhere from a few seconds to as much as a minute or more. It can take a lot longer than this for e-mail addresses which do not happen to be in the address book of the user's e-mail application. These short periods of time can add up to significant amounts of time spent each day if the user is in a position that requires information received in e-mails to be funneled forward to other users. For example, a user who manages or coordinates a project often receives dozens or even hundreds of incoming e-mails from many different sources which must be read and forwarded to the appropriate group of people on a daily basis. Another typical scenario occurs when a new person joins an existing project, and someone is tasked with forwarding all of the relevant e-mail to that person so they can get up to speed on the project.
Using convention systems to forwarding e-mail can be time consuming and lead to errors if the e-mail address is mistyped or the wrong address is cut-and-pasted from elsewhere. What is needed is a more robust, convenient means of forwarding e-mail communications.